because it was morning all at once to them;
forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this
moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this
new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not
less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,--the
door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the passage,
and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance
wide-eyed and pale.

"Desire! Come!"

"Sylvie! _What_, dear?" cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet
her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie's own, catching in it
the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words. She did
not need the further revelation of her face to know that something
deep and strange had happened.

Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along
the hall.

Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.

Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa,
against the two large pillows.

"A minute ago," said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke
out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, "she
was _here_! She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and
_now_,--when I turned round,"--

She was _There_.

The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of
the fruit, stood upon the sideboard. The book she had been reading
fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-glasses inside it, at the
page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had
fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone
instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.

Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free
like the uncaging of a bird.

Hypertrophy of the heart. The gradual thickening and hardening of
those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they
are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till
a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in
that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing,
over a threshold it may pass no more again, forever.

CHAPTER XXXII.

EASTER LILIES.

Bright, soft days began to come; days in which windows stood open,
and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days
alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with
bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet
anticipa